We all engage with informational systems.  Whether a defined social group, a historical canon, or ideas contained only in our own head, we are all in the business of parsing through data streams.  It can be overwhelming, especially with the amount of information coming at us these days. We have to be careful about what information we approach and what we avoid, else risk total submersion in cognitive dissonance (or maybe just another day idled away, constantly refreshing Gmails and Facebooks.)

Art materializes the strategies we use to make sense of the world.  It gives us distance, that we might evaluate what we see, learn from it, learn what we like and don’t like, learn the strategies others have employed in creating what we do like. 

In this way, artists reveal to us ways of approaching life.  They help us understand ourselves, refine our values and improve our existence.  Maybe.

Open daily during Notman House hours of operation.

Presented by FASA (Concordia's Fine Art Student Alliance).

The Notman House artists demonstrate an interest in reconciling the idea-oriented functioning of the mind with the realities of material existence.

The lightbox is a standard device of photographic presentation.  Typically clean, austere, plastic and perfect, Sean Orena’s lightboxes take a different turn.  Built in DIY-fashion with construction lamps and xeroxed paper, his lightboxes present a material correlate to their subjects’ interior attitudes. 

Mélissa Gagné, teacher, invites you to enjoy information overload in a continuous flow of non-stop teaching. Using the pedagogical form of a lecture, she attempts to deliver all the knowledge available to humankind. The course is welcome to anyone willing to grasp the complexity of the world through power point presentations and conferrence under hypnosis.

Kyle Beal presents "The Nervous Hedonist," an approximate representation of a human nervous system. An homage to the pursuit of pleasure, or sorts. Agitated by the awareness that the pleasure won't last, or perhaps that some amusements are artlessly artificial? Some pleasures are just poor taste.

Rachel Shaw’s paintings use the isometric “god’s eye” perspective to depict stark interiors populated by familiar objects in idealized geometric terms.  Geometric perfection and daily empirical qualia are united and given a new physical truth in the reality of a painted canvas.  Which is to say, they’re pretty darn good paintings.
 
A similar concern is explored by Sadaf Hakimian’s installation: human bodies, their digital representation and their literal mirrored reflections unite in one space.  The “true” representation is made irrelevant in the interest of the pure aesthetic qualities of representation.
 
Patryk Stasieczek’s photographs use chromatic breakdowns to symbolize the different participants within small social units.  These monochrome portraits, when printed together, create the illusion of one whole body constituted by a multiplicity, in a metaphysical argument for our similitude.